Don’t we just need to go back to the Bible?

Conservative Protestant Church Gains and Losses (June 1, 2023)

You might have noticed a glimmer of hope in the figures noted in my article titled Which denominations are not holding up their end of the load?  It was that conservative protestant weekly attendance figures rose by 25% during a period in which all other Christian denominations suffered significant declines1.  The Bibby polls seem to define conservative protestant churches as comprising Baptists, Pentecostals, Mennonite and ‘other’ non-mainstream.  In another poll, he refers to the group as evangelical protestants.  Nonetheless, rising attendance is good, isn’t it?  Perhaps if we all just became Pentecostals, the church would be doing great in Canada.

I am not going to agree with or deny this sentiment.  However, we need a bit more analysis to flesh out the matter.  

First, if conservative protestant churches have been doing so well for so long, there must now be a lot of them in Canada.  Paradoxically, there aren’t.  According to Statistics Canada, in 2019 there were 526,000 people identifying as Baptist, 188,000 as Anabaptist, 300,000 as “Pentecostal and other Charismatic religions”, and 1,654,000 as “Other Christian and Christian-related traditions.”5  However, the total of around 2.7 million conservative protestants pales a bit compared to the 12 million Roman Catholics, the 4 million mainline protestants (Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist/Wesleyan, Reformed/Presbyterian, United) and, unhelpfully, the 9.9 million claiming no religion.  Using the numbers above, people identifying as conservative protestants totalled only 9.7% of all people identifying with a religious denomination in 2019.

The other point to note is that while those identifying with a mainline protestant church dropped from 48% of the population in 1931 to 10.1% in 2019, those identifying with a conservative protestant denomination increase very little, around 8.0% to 9.7% over this same period.3  Thus, people falling away from mainline protestant churches were not inclined to move over to conservative protestant churches in any great numbers.  In other words, conservative protestants had a bountiful harvest of disaffected mainline protestants to reap, and they failed to do so.  

So, do we really have a paradox concerning conservative protestants?  It appears that we have more of an inter-church phenomena where those in conservative churches are becoming more devout but not more numerous (i.e., not growing at rates faster than the Canadian population).  The phenomena might be even more dramatic than this.  It might represent a polarization of core Christian religious beliefs.  While the conservatives appear to becoming more devote (which suggests more conservative), the main-liners might be leaving because their churches have not become liberal enough (e.g., same-sex marriage, LGBTQ priests, women in the priesthood).  If this is the case, it is no wonder that the conservatives are not picking up disaffected main-liners.

I made one final observation.  The average age of conservative protestant church members is lower than that for mainline protestant churches4.  Perhaps this provides a little ray of hope for the future for conservative churches.

____________________

1. Bibby, Reginald W, Resilient Gods: being pro-religious, low religious or no religious in Canada,

     UBC Press, 2017, page 33

2. Statistics Canada, 2011 National Household Survey,

    https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/Rp-eng.cfm?APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0&GID=0&GK=0&GRP=0&LANG=E&PID=105399&PRID=0&PTYPE=105277&S=0&SHOWALL=0&SUB=0&THEME=95&Temporal=2013&VID=0&VNAMEE=&VNAMEF=

3. Bibby, page 34

4. Wikipedia, Religion in Canada, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Canada#Age_and_religion

5. Statistics Canada, Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019,

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2021001/article/00010-eng.htm